


Fury

by battle_cat



Series: Fury Road Ficlets [1]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Anger, Character Study, Ficlet, Gen, Originally Posted on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-25 20:22:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6208765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rage is the first weapon she reaches for and the one she’s most comfortable with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fury

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [my Tumblr](http://fuckyeahisawthat.tumblr.com/post/140299013600/fury).

Her first instinct is always to fight tooth and nail, to let anger overwhelm self-preservation. Rage is the first weapon she reaches for and the one she’s most comfortable with.

Her birth mother and her initiate mother are always trying to teach her, before she is taken: you won’t always be able to win by fighting. The world is not set up to your advantage. You can’t always be a brawler. Sometimes you need to be a sniper. You need to learn how to stay cold when they run hot, be patient and wait for them to make a mistake. Sometimes you need to outsmart them, or bargain with them, or manipulate them, or just be more prepared and more ruthless than them. Sometimes you need to scheme and plan and understand politics. Sometimes you need allies.

Furiosa of the Green Place scoffs because this sounds like bullshit. But later, surrounded by enemies in an awful place, when she’s fought and fought and fought and found it fucking _useless_ , she starts thinking about those lessons again and working out what they mean. It’s hard because her first instinct is still anger; she has _so much_ of it and she wants to scream and break things always, but she slowly understands that her mothers were teaching her how to survive.

So, slowly, she learns: how to hold back her hate and convince someone she is on their side, how to pour the anger into deeds that will prove her loyalty and get her one step closer to a way out. How to distinguish between who needs a beat-down in the sparring pits and who needs a good scare in a dark corridor and who needs to have a suspicious accident. And, every once in a while, who can be trusted, at least as far as a mutual agreement to have each others’ backs.

At first she thinks of it as just another form of manipulation: finding out what someone wants and helping them get it, working out how to get them a shine job or the right spot on a crew, the one that fits best with their strengths. Choosing to help someone rather than exploit them in a moment of weakness, because they’ll owe her a debt later. Choosing to step in and protect someone as insurance for when she might need the same thing.

Then one day she looks around and realizes there are people around her who respect and trust her, who want to protect her even if they get nothing back, who look up to her, not out of fear but out of admiration and maybe even love. And she realizes that there have been moments, in the desert wind and the rush of battle with her crew working together _perfectly_ , that she forgot, just for a second, that she was someone else’s property.

It’s confusing.

Those are the moments when she has to lean on rage again, her oldest, most faithful weapon, remember all the bad things that are why she’s supposed to be getting _out_ , to protect herself.

She doesn’t know if he ever realizes that sending her back into the Vault, the first place, the worst place, the rotten core of his rotten system, is what did it. She never even knows for sure if he recognizes the discarded girl Wife in his faithful Imperator, if he really doesn’t remember or if he’s too arrogant to question her loyalty. But here she is, trapped again in the place of nightmares, this time not as a prisoner but as a prison guard, his trusted agent against five mirrors of her old self.

In the end, she’s grateful, in a kind of sick way, that he reminded her of her place. It makes it easier for rage, her old friend, to win out against everything else. She knows, now, how to balance it with coldness and cunning and planning. She’s an Imperator.

She plans and plans and twenty things still go sideways anyway. She’s fought enough battles to know that’s how it always is; she knows the people who survive are the ones who can stay cold and think and plan when the original plan’s going to shit, and the ones who stay lucky long enough. Her luck holds almost long enough. Almost.

Then she’s bleeding out and her rage is the only tool she has left, but it’s okay, because it’s the perfect tool for the job. It’s an old familiar weapon and she knows exactly what it can do. Knows it’s stronger than pain and the fear of death. Stronger than him, too.

Her mothers were right, she thinks as she drifts into unconsciousness. You need all kinds of weapons to survive. But sometimes the best weapon for the task is the one you know best of all.


End file.
